


Last Light

by printers_devil



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Choking, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Black Eagles Route, Imprisonment, Post-Canon, Scars, The Great Fodlan Bakeoff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:29:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24625522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/printers_devil/pseuds/printers_devil
Summary: She would gladly break Dimitri if it meant she did not have to kill him.As far as the world knows, the last Blaiddyd king died defending Faerghus at the Tailtean Plains. No one was going to come looking for him in the Imperial Palace.Edelgard spares Dimitri in order to use him in the fight against Those Who Slither. Eventually. First, however, she has to bring him around to her side.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Edelgard von Hresvelg
Comments: 21
Kudos: 93





	Last Light

**Author's Note:**

> This wanted very badly to be a whole novel about the two of them moving past, uhhh, the whole "war that engulfed all of Fódlan" and "lots of murder" and "two cases of absolutely roaring PTSD" thing, but your pal PD was on a deadline. The themes were: "exploration, secret, ambition, and devotion."

"I'm not going to let you starve to death, so you may as well eat on your own." Edelgard said, setting the tray on the small gilded table next to the bed. "I'm not trying to poison you, either, despite, well. _Hubert_. Really, Dimitri. If I'd wanted you dead, you would be dead."

Instead, she was keeping Dimitri here in a room overlooking the courtyard in the palace in Enbarr, leashed like a dog. She didn't like to do it, but it was necessary; the shackles that bound his ankles were made of agarthium, and too strong even for Dimitri to break. He had shattered three sets of ordinary manacles, broken Ferdinand's jaw and collarbone, and killed a half-dozen guards before they finally found restraints that worked. They let him move about the room, wash himself, and use the privy, but they stopped well short of the door, and came nowhere near the small, high window. 

_Just keep him in the dungeons, your majesty,_ Hubert had said. 

_No,_ said Edelgard. _I can bring him around. I want him treated kindly._

She'd already done at least two impossible things in her lifetime. She could do another.

It was going as well as she'd expected. She visited him every day, and eventually he stopped trying to murder her so often. Hubert had also offered to visit him, but Edelgard knew what a _visit_ from Hubert entailed, and had ordered him to stand down: she was to be Dimitri's only contact with the outside world, or as near to it as was feasible. Most days, he did not even react to her presence, but she made it a point to speak to him.

"Margrave Gautier has finally agreed to stand down, and the new Duchess Fraldarius is very eager to enter into trade talks." She poured him a cup of tea from the service and prepared him some food from the tray, and set them down on the bed, the teacup balanced precariously on the plate. "A bit too eager, if you ask me, but her title to the dukedom is tenuous; she's the only Fraldarius cousin we could find who bore the crest. I don't like it, but her blood makes her more palatable to the people of her territory--I certainly don't need a peasant rebellion on my hands after five years of war, and it's a bit too soon to dissolve the nobility of an entire country." 

"I don't care," Dimitri said.

This was the first time she'd heard him speak in a week. She did not let surprise break her stride: "No, I suppose you wouldn't. In any event, I'm going to Fhirdiad to meet with her and the Margrave tomorrow, and I'll be staying for two weeks."

A long silence. Edelgard poured herself a cup of tea and pulled the spindly chair. It had taken Dimitri a month and a half to shop shattering any furniture they put within his reach, including his bed and his privy. Ferdinand had joked that their guest was singlehandedly keeping half of Enbarr's carpenters in business, and had received an Imperial glare for his trouble. 

Dimitri rolled over onto his back. The plate tilted dangerously, the sauce threatening to spill on the sheets, but he picked it up before it could. "Two weeks," he said.

He sounded as sullen and exhausted as always, and perhaps Edelgard was merely reading the consternation into his voice because she wanted it to be there. "Ah, this tea is excellent," she said. "Ferdinand's suggestion. Try the food, please."

It was a shame that he'd been refusing meals lately, but if Edelgard had been defeated, imprisoned, and seen her Empire carved up by invaders and the greedy traitors who'd collaborated with them, she would have tried to fall on any sword she could get her hands on, no matter how slender the blade.

"I'll have some new reading material brought up from the library for you. Do you have any preferences?" No answer. "I'll have Hubert choose a selection, then, and I'll deliver them before I go."

Dimitri finally sat up and took the plate of food. He ate with his hands, ravenously, glaring at her. When he showed that he could behave himself, she'd consider giving him a fork. "You're the Emperor."

"And you're one of my subjects. It's the least I can do." 

The corners of mouth twisted downward hard. Whatever point he'd been about to make, it was gone. Still, she'd goaded words--civil words--out of him. This time last week, he'd spent the entire visit telling her exactly what he was going to do with her limbs when he pulled them off her body. A week and a half before that, he'd broken off a piece of a metal tray and secreted it away in his sheets to try to cut her throat when she brought him his food.

He couldn't hold out forever. She knew what she was doing. The irony was not lost on her that the Agarthans had done this precise thing to her: because it worked. She would gladly break Dimitri if it meant she did not have to kill him. 

Dimitri finished his food and moved on to the cup of tea. She gave him nothing but the best. As prisons went, it could have been far worse. Edelgard sat in silence with him for twenty minutes, and the moment she left, she heard the sound of the teapot and tray shattering against the door behind her.

The guard at the door sighed, but did not comment. They knew better. They were well-paid for their silence, their sister received Imperial sponsorship to attend Garreg Mach, and their parents had recently been given a beautiful plot of farmland in the countryside by an anonymous benefactor. She nodded to them and went next door to her office.

It was cool and quiet in here. The weak autumn sunlight filtered through the window, making the room look washed out, like an old painting of itself. She took no meetings in this office; she handled no official business with anyone save Byleth or Hubert. She merely read reports and attended to any correspondence she could not trust to her secretaries. Sometimes, she napped. After they'd figured out how to keep him bound, she'd spent hours in here listening to Dimitri weep through the thin wall separating them.

It had been horrible, but it had been her penance. She listened to hear what he was doing now—no sound came through the wall. Perhaps he'd fallen asleep, or was preparing himself to exercise as best he could. She could peek in and check on him whenever she wished, but she never did. 

*

Ferdinand was an irritating chatterbox. Prime Minister von Aegir, however, was a gracious guest with beautiful manners, who always knew the correct thing to say, and made a wonderful cover for her terrible mood. They did not stay in the palace at Fhirdiad, but Edelgard snuck out of the home the army had commandeered there to wander its halls, looking for something that might help her get through to him. Her memories of this place were dim; she had only visited her mother there twice, accompanied by her uncle.

The palace itself was a wreck, and no one challenged her when she walked past the guards. They knew their emperor. It was a massive building, and would have to be disposed of somehow. On the trip north, Ferdinand had suggested a hospital, a home for foundlings, a university, selling it to the School of Sorcery, which had come out of the war with a tidy profit from hiring its mages out to both sides. Edelgard was still thinking on it.

She meandered through the halls, opening doors at her whim. Here was a room where food was stored and prepared on the third floor, to be sent out quickly to any hungry guests. Here was a tiny closet of a room, packed almost floor to ceiling with books. On the topmost floor, she found the king's apartments. Dimitri's bedroom was untouched. His bedsheets were still rumpled, preserved in the state he must have left them when he'd departed for the Plains. He must have known he was going to lose. He'd had the superior numbers, but she'd had the superior force. 

She lay down in the bed, gazing up at the ceiling, try to think of what might have been going through his mind. Perhaps he'd conferred with the Immaculate One, and he'd hoped to be another King Loog, snatching a victory from the jaws of defeat. The Empire and the Kingdom told two very different stories about that battle; it was impossible to know the truth. The sheets were cool against her bare arms, and the pillowcase still smelled like Dimitri, somehow, after all these long months. She inhaled deeply, letting her eyes fall shut. 

How pathetic was she, lying in an empty bed and sniffing a pillowcase? The intelligent thing to do would be to find a professional to distract her--there was no shortage of blonds in the north, her father had had six wives and countless mistresses, no one would bat an eyelash if she had a liaison. Still, lying here, she could imagine a childhood where those three golden years in Faerghus had stretched into four years, then five years, then an entire childhood spent in Fhirdiad. 

She remembered very little of it, except that it had been good, that she had not been afraid, and that her uncle had still been her uncle, and a little blond boy came along to her house with her mother to play sometimes. She'd thought he was her mother's serving boy, and would never have guessed that he was crown prince of Faerghus. She'd been insistent on teaching him something, but she could not for the life of her recall what it had been. The harder she'd tried to hold onto those memories, the farther they'd slipped away from her. If she had never left Faerghus--her hair would still be brown. She would have joined the Blue Lions, maybe, as Edelgard von Arundel. She would not have Hubert or the professor, or an empire that spanned the width of a continent.

She got up and wandered around his room, gathering up a bag full of what looked like things he might have cared about. A miniature portrait of a shaggy brown dog. A silver-handled comb that had strands of his hair still caught in its teeth, and so on. A small, cloth-bound child's devotional.. She opened it to the first page and saw _Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd_ in written in a shaky, round hand, and snapped it shut. 

*

When she came back to the palace, there were a dozen things that needed her _immediate_ attention. She caught herself in endless council meetings watching the clock, waiting for for them to be over, for there to be a spare fifteen minutes in her schedule. It was two days before she had the time to slip out and visit Dimitri.

The guard had been bringing him his meals, and they looked relieved to see her. 

"Did you miss me?" she asked. He looked incredulous. "No, I suppose you wouldn't." 

Dimitri looked sullenly up from his book. He'd arranged the volumes she'd brought him into two stacks, one on either side of his bed. He'd torn the pages from some of them to fold into complicated shapes, flowers, birds--one of the books had been a manual on how to do that sort of thing. She would not have thought his hands capable of such delicate work, but she was here to learn about him, after all.

As she always did, she sat down on the edge of his bed. "The Royal Palace in Fhirdiad. What should be done with it?"

"Burn it to the ground."

"I was thinking about selling it to the School of Sorcery, but it might be more productive to turn it to charitable works."

"Do what you will with it," Dimitri said.

On a normal day, she would have simply turned the subject to something else. But she was here with a reward for him, and he was going to earn it. "If you had invaded me," she said, "what would you have done with this palace?" 

With seeming relish, he tore a page from the book in his lap and began folding it. "I would have kept it intact and used it as a base of operations to quell rebellion in the city," he said as he worked. "When the city was pacified, I would have chosen a new base of operations in the city, and then weighed whether it was worth the expense of razing the buildings and selling off the land it stood on in order to make a profit for the crown." 

"Interesting," she said, and produced the bag of his possessions from a deep pocket of her dress. "I stopped by your palace when I was in Fhirdiad. I thought it might bring you some comfort to have familiar things around." 

He snatched the bag up as though he thought it might be a trick and rummaged through it, pulling out the items in turn and laying them on the bed before him. She'd kept the devotional for herself. "Do you think this will make up for the murder of my family? The deaths of our classmates? _This?_ " He gestured around the room.

"King Dimitri," she said, and he flinched from the title. Good. She needed to keep him on edge. "I was an invalid that year. I could barely hold my axe and a shield at the same time, let alone orchestrate a massacre."

She undid the top button of her dress, and Dimitri's nostrils flared with disgust. "I wondered how long it would take you to come to that," he said, reaching for the laces of his trousers. "Get it over with, then."

"Stop that. Don't be ridiculous," said Edelgard, undoing more buttons. "I need you to understand why I could not have arranged your father's murder."

"More lies," he said.

"That may well be so," Edelgard replied. Patient, she had to be patient. She finished with her buttons, turned around, and let her dress fall to her waist. 

Only Hubert had ever seen her like this. "Touch them, if you like. Tell me if they seem like lies to you." 

Dimitri ran a big, rough hand down her back, the flat of his palm passing over each of her scars in turn. This was the most reckless thing she'd done in years, showing her naked back to a man who could rip her spine out with a thought. But his touch was gentle and careful, his breathing measured. He added a second hand, spreading his fingers wide to encircle her waist, come around her front. She had scars there as well. He did not explore them, but simply held her there. 

No one had touched her like this in a very long time, not since a very long night spent in a very dirty tent with Ferdinand. It wasn't her fault if her pulse kicked up, if her mouth felt dry.

"This was done to me as a child by the same creatures who arranged your family's death," she explained. "I used them to win my war, and now I'm fighting to destroy them."

"So you allied yourself with them," he said. "You're complicit." His fingers tightened infinitesimally on her waist. She had seen those hands shatter a man's skull, but she squared her shoulders and stared straight ahead. She was the fire that had remade Fódlan; she had no fear in her heart. 

"I am." She'd made her peace with that a long time ago. "But they made me into their weapon. They killed my brothers and sisters, violated my flesh, all but guaranteed that I wouldn't live past fifty. They organized the rebellion against my father, they took everything from me." 

He said nothing.

"I have two Crests, Dimitri. Do you know what that means? Our bodies were not meant to bear that kind of power." 

With incredible slowness, Dimitri's one of hands slid up her front to hold her throat. His free arm snaked around her waist to crush her to him, his cheek pressed into the middle of her back. He was trembling against her, and she held herself still. She could comfort him, if only he'd let her. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could get the first syllable out, he squeezed, cutting off her windpipe. At first, she tried not to struggle, but the animal of her body was stronger than her mind, and when the last of her air ran out her hands flew to his wrist, trying to pry him off of her. She saw stars, and her body felt weak; she let her arms drop to her sides. 

He could have killed her. No one would have known. Instead, he released her with a little shove that sent her stumbling. 

"You should have taken your chance," she said, her voice hoarse. She tugged her dress up to her shoulders, but she did not have the presence of mind to button it up yet. "I've been prepared to die since I was fourteen, old friend." 

"So have I." 

They watched one another, then, Dimitri with wide eyes, Edelgard massaging her throat. If there were bruises, Hubert would become _unreasonable_ , and he was so tedious when he was unreasonable.

"I _knew_ you, El," Dimitri snarled, suddenly. "I knew you the whole time we were at Garreg Mach. And you never knew me."

"And you think that perhaps if I'd just spoken to you, I would have remembered you, and this could have been avoided." 

"I tried. I wanted to be your friend. You wouldn't listen." 

She had not thought much on Dimitri at Garreg Mach; it was not until years later and a stray report from Hubert on the Tragedy of Duscur that she connected the lines and realized that Dimitri was her mother's servant boy, the one who'd given her the dagger. None of that mattered, now.

"None of this could have been avoided," Edelgard said. "I would have moved on the Monastery regardless of my feelings about you. You cannot live in the past." 

"The dead," he said, with no further explanation. 

"The war is over. You've lost," she said. "But until you die, you haven't failed them. Please, help me fight against the creatures who destroyed our families. I'll tell you everything, I'll answer all your question." 

And for one breathless instant, she thought it would be that easy: that she'd brought him around, that she'd broken him down enough that he'd _listen_ to her. He'd spared her life, after all, when he could have ended it so easily. He hesitated, his lips parted, and he looked at her, considering.

"No. Leave me," Dimitri said, picking up the paper he'd been folding. It was another bird.

"Very well," she replied, buttoning up the front of her dress. 

And she left, but not before she'd pocketed one of his finished pieces as an ornament for her desk, and a reminder that she was close, and that he would help her eventually, if only she kept on. She had all the time in the world, and he had nowhere to go. 

**Author's Note:**

> Follow your pal PD on twitter at [@a_printersdevil](https://twitter.com/a_printersdevil).


End file.
